“Why?” Elise asked.
“Wasn’t safe. A lot of people started to panic, and when a lot of people start to panic, no good thing comes from it.”
“Where did you come from?”
“Up north. Albany.”
“You have any family?”
“Had a wife. She died a few years ago—cancer—we never had kids.”
“Then how’d you end up here?” Sean asked, his voice coming out of nowhere like a sudden burst of thunder when she hadn’t expected a storm.
“I walked,” Travers said.
“You walked all the way here? From Albany?”
“I mean, it took a while. I started with a car, but it ran out of gas. Everybody wants to go south, you know? Where it might be warm.”
“Then how’d you come across us?”
“I don’t understand,” he said and looked at the others. “I just came across you.”
“You’re right,” Sean said. “You don’t understand.”
Elise tensed.
“I want to know how you’re not dead.”
Travers leveled his eyes on Sean. “Managed it.”
“You said earlier that you haven’t been in front of a fire for weeks. The mercury outside says that it’s almost fifteen below. So how’ve you survived without fire for so long?”
“A little skill, a little luck, I guess.”
“What kind of skill?”
“Sean, please,” Elise said.
He ignored her. “What kind of skills allowed you to survive?”
“Scavenging, mainly. I’ve been in a bunch of people’s houses. All abandoned.”
“They would be just as cold as the outside. You’d freeze to death.”
Travers’s leg shook up and down, though he kept his voice steady. “I’m sorry, I don’t know what I did, man.”
Elise wasn’t sure what he had done either. Michael said, “Sorry, just ignore him.”
Kelly smacked his chest. Elise wished she could do the same.
“Excuse me?” Sean said.
Michael looked at his wife and bit his tongue. “Nothing.”
“No, he’s right,” Travers said. Everyone looked at him. “Not him,” he said pointing to Michael, “that one. Sean, is it? He’s right. You shouldn’t trust people so easily.”
Something popped in the fireplace followed by a chorus of crackles and hisses. “Every one of you doesn’t get it, because this thing hasn’t hit you. Not really. You sit here in this cozy little home. Barely any ash in here. It’s neat. Sanitized. Cut off from everything that’s going on out there. From the dark and the cold and the pain and the hurt. You haven’t seen it yet, and you don’t get it because of it.”
Michael shook his head.
“You still live in the world like it was a few months back—where there are boundaries and limits stopping what’s really in your heart from being unleashed. You haven’t seen the cold cutting down the people you care about. And if the cold don’t get you, it’s the predators who want to keep living more than anything. More than sparing your sorry asses.”
Sean leaned forward in his seat.
“You haven’t seen someone carrying food when you got a deep ache in your belly so strong you don’t know what you’d do to relieve it. You haven’t looked a man in his eyes and seen he’s got no soul no more. No humanity. Or too much humanity. That ash and snow sucked everything good from the world and left a dirty gray and that’s all there is. The white snow ain’t coming back and no matter how much you want that clean again, it ain’t coming.”
Elise watched Sean’s face grow stormier, more fearful. More determined. God help her, more determined. Like a man being nudged closer to a precipice.
Travers said, “You know I always remember hearing, We live in an important time. This is the most important election or era or whatever. We might be the first people in a while to be witness to something that’s truly changing everything. So, enjoy all this while you can. Enjoy your hot showers and your warm fires and your hot stews. They’re a thing of the past. You just don’t know it yet.”
“Travers,” Elise said, her voice shaking.
He shook his head. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to scare y’all. It’s just surprising, coming here. Getting a warm welcome. There ain’t no place I seen like this no more. With kind folks willing to share. I just want you to be aware. Not everyone’s as kind as me. Or y’all. Not even a little bit. Not by a long shot.”
Chapter 18
MICHAEL LAY AWAKE next to Kelly listening to Travers’s snoring as the fire dwindled down to coals. Travers was full of shit. Not entirely, of course. Michael had listened to enough half-truth telling clients to know when he was sniffing bullshit, and right now the scent was strong.
The world he knew was the one where good people helped each other get back on their feet. He had seen it time after time. Some disaster would strike, an earthquake in Haiti or a powerful hurricane that ravaged the Philippines. The aftermath always played out the same: good people reached out and donated time and money to help with the relief. People took care of one another. It’s always the way it happened.
And the same would happen again.
There was no savage land out there like Travers had talked about. Just because he had seen terrible things—if it was even true—didn’t mean that all of humanity was suddenly rotten. Anecdotal evidence was all it was. People were complex. Some good, some bad. If Michael had to pinpoint it, he’d say Travers’s story was a ploy; he was letting them think the outside was the worst hell imaginable so he could stay with them. He would say, You wouldn’t release me back into hell, right? He was playing them. And doing it well.
Because Kelly believed him. Long after everyone was asleep, he had to listen to her insist that there was a real danger outside and they needed to be prepared. He tried to argue with her, but she was inconsolable. “What if someone tries to come in and kill us?” she whispered to him. “What if it happens?”
“Nobody’s coming to kill us,” he said.
“And what if he’s right about all that’s going on?”
“He’s not.”
“Says who? You? You haven’t seen it. You haven’t seen the people eating each other out there.”
“He never said they were eating each other.”
“But you don’t know that.”
“You’re being ridiculous. Do you think there’s some biker gang who’s just going to stroll across the hills of Nowhereland, Pennsylvania and attack us? Come on. We have greater concerns inside our own house than outside.”
She wouldn’t hear it though. She took an hour to fall asleep and even then, she wouldn’t stop clinging to him. When her grip finally loosened, he scuttled out of his sleeping bag. He tiptoed toward the fireplace, grabbed a log from the woodpile, and placed it on top of the coals. The strands of bark and wood fibers burned like fine hairs. The log caught fire, and he sat mesmerized as the flames licked it over and consumed it.
“Thanks for feeding the fire,” a voice came from behind him, hushed but strong.
Michael jumped and twisted around. Travers snored from deep in his throat, and Kelly rolled to the side to get more comfortable on her pillow. Michael’s vision, with a deep purple spot in the middle from looking at the fire, swept over the darkness behind him but saw nothing.